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The Future of Freeview ?

Troys5g

Super Pro Member
I 100% agree, get rid of it and free up the bandwidth for mobile services. We (as in those in rural areas) could really do with more UHF mobile bandwidth, as we're never going to be able to take advantage of the higher frequency mobile bands (because of the physical limitations).

We can't get Freeview here anyway, like a fair few rural areas we lost terrestrial TV when TV went digital, years ago. Like pretty much everyone in this position we just switched to satellite (Freesat), and got much better live TV as a consequence. We got our original Freesat dish and box free because of the switchover, too. Nowadays we could easily do without live TV, even with our relatively slow FTTC. At a guess, about 70% of our viewing is streamed, although only at 1080P. Be no hardship to just use streamed video, TBH.
 
I am generalising so please don't shoot me for doing so. But I think the vast majority of those under 50 don't bother with terrestrial TV and do their TV watching over the internet. And those over 50 just bother with the main channels from BBC, ITV and Channel 4 and do not ever watch the obscure channels like Really, GreatMovies and ForcesTV. And who in their right thinking mind in 2023 uses QVC.

Therefore get rid of most of the channels and set them online (and Freesat) only via the new upcoming IPTV service in 2024. And have the core channels in HD on limited wavelength OTA and then use the free wavelengths for 5G

Why can the UK government not do anything sensible?
 
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Interesting discussion. I did read that Freeview isn't going anywhere soon? Satellite is an option to replace, if can mount a dish and get a view of the sky.
I am a Sky customer. I had a spell of doing without while I had it installed at my Dad's where he paid for it and I used Sky go. Then I tried accessing terrestrial to supplement. Tried Freeview. FreeSat. Digibox (Freeview over IP and access via app on streaming box). I went back to Sky Q.

Even though Sky would rather I transition to streaming Sky Glass / Stream - I'll be staying with Sky Q for now. I like to access live TV. Record live tv on own set top box and watch it back when I want. I don't want it to disappear - because a certain provider no longer has the rights or am only allowed to keep for a certain number of days. Or am at the whim of Catch up services whether something is or isn't available. Then is there an ownership / collection experience side to it? I recorded it. I may have got the whole series. I owned it. Now I've watched it, I can keep it again or I can delete it straight away.

Next step, is to be able to directly access a video stream from my Sky box anywhere I want. Encoder. VNC. Etc. (DIY version of a Slingbox - such a shame that died).

Agree, removing Freeview would allow that space to be used more efficiently, but there's a trade off with still keeping people connected and maybe more so the less technically savvy.

FYI, I am 43. For my age, am I in the majority or the minority for wanting to consume TV in this manner?
 
FYI, I am 43. For my age, am I in the majority or the minority for wanting to consume TV in this manner?

FWIW I'm nearly 71, and really don't see any need for terrestrial TV. Setting up a dish is a lot easier than setting up a TV antenna - I fitted ours five years ago, took me maybe an hour to do, just bolted it to the side of the house and aligned it with an £8 satellite finder meter. No special tools needed, even the RF connectors are an easy DIY job to fit as the Type F's just screw directly on to the end of a cut cable.
 
In these days linear TV content is rubbish, there is even no need for STB with recording option because everything is being repeated. This applies to both FTA and so called premium. Selling frequencies to mobile operators will not make any difference, they will be always behind the rest of the world. I would get rid off DVB-T (SD) as these channels are nothing more than ad carrier and switch everything to DVB-T2
 
I am still old school and use my Freesat box to record series, although I am not in the 50+ demographic . I find ITVX and Five app incredibly unstable.

I have not used Freeview for a long time as every TV in the house has a satellite feed running to it.

I thought when the DSO came they would have maybe tried to push us all over to satellite.
 
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FWIW, we had a problem with ITVX. Turned out to be the TV. Streaming ITVX through the Freesat box works like a charm. We've now stopped using the "smart" rubbish in the TV and just use it as an HDMI monitor.
 
We've now stopped using the "smart" rubbish in the TV and just use it as an HDMI monitor.
This is the case with I think every "smart" TV. They lack both CPU and RAM to actually function "well" (Especially with the move to adopt AndroidTV). You're better off buying something like an nvidia shield, and using that for your "smart" apps.

I wish TV Manufacturers would just include some of the old standards, and basically make a huge monitor that just takes input & swaps between them. (but includes RCA, SCART, lots of HDMIs, etc.)
If Sony made a "Monitor TV" at ~ 65" that just had a load of connectivity options, I'd be snapping their hand off.
 
I wish TV Manufacturers would just include some of the old standards, and basically make a huge monitor that just takes input & swaps between them. (but includes RCA, SCART, lots of HDMIs, etc.)
If Sony made a "Monitor TV" at ~ 65" that just had a load of connectivity options, I'd be snapping their hand off.


Exactly my view!

I had a look around a while ago to see if I could get a large monitor to replace our TV. Seems they are both rare and very expensive.
 
Exactly my view!

I had a look around a while ago to see if I could get a large monitor to replace our TV. Seems they are both rare and very expensive.
Smart TVs are a privacy nighmare and their main purpose has become to turn you into the product by means of ads, telemetry and data mining (which they then sell on).

I don't have any such TVs in the house, resorted to buying a second hand 65" digital signage monitor, but it was hard to find, not sure what I'll do when this breaks down.

I'll have to learn some electronics and disable the smartness myself from any new products I guess. I bet there's already some community of "weirdos" busy with such things, jyst need to find them. 😂
 
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As for Freeview, we're watching a good amount of telly and radio, so I hope that indeed it doesn't go away (or online-only), but I will agree half the channels there could be dumped in favour of more HD ones.
 
As for Freeview, we're watching a good amount of telly and radio, so I hope that indeed it doesn't go away (or online-only), but I will agree half the channels there could be dumped in favour of more HD ones.
I live right next to the Ayr to Glasgow Central railway and in the winter when it's frosty, every time a train goes past the sparks from the pantograph just totally freeze freeview, it's fine in non frosty mornings though.

Not really bothered as all my viewing is by streaming now.

Just thought I'd share some useless Freeview info with you. 😁
 
Smart TVs are a privacy nighmare and their main purpose has become to turn you into the product by means of ads, telemetry and data mining (which they then sell on).

I do not disagree, although my experience with LG recently is that you can at least request that it does the minimum necessary to work without sharing excessive data for ads etc. What in reality is actually happening is another matter.

But I question whether in reality it would be any different if you use the smartness built into the TV or an external device (nvidea, Roku, NOW TV, whatever your device of choice) - it's effectively going to be a similar app doing a similar job of using your credentials to provide you access to some content along with the opportunity to use your behaviour and habits to predict what you want to watch or buy or do, etc.
 
If you opt for a Freesat box then you can stream through that without excessive data snooping. Our network runs through Pi Hole, so blocking stuff is relatively easy, but when I've bothered to check the logs it doesn't look like the Freesat box does anything untoward.

There are limitations when streaming through the Freesat box, but as we mostly watch iPlayer and ITVX we don't experience those. We subscribe to ITVX purely to get rid of the advert breaks, which seems to work OK. You still get the breaks where the ads would have been but they only last a second or two.

The other way to stream fairly privately is to use something like OSMC. For a time we ran this on a Raspberry Pi 3 and it was fine. My only slight criticism was that the menus were a bit clunky, but other than that it worked OK and was pretty secure.
 
FWIW, we had a problem with ITVX. Turned out to be the TV. Streaming ITVX through the Freesat box works like a charm. We've now stopped using the "smart" rubbish in the TV and just use it as an HDMI monitor.
Same here. LG TV became to old and apps out of support and not support all apps. Got new Hisense 50" 4K tv. That has all he main apps, but I use that as an HDMI monitor these days. Although nice to have HDMI ARC that works properly, turns the soundbar on and off each time we use the telly, no problems.
 
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If you opt for a Freesat box then you can stream through that without excessive data snooping. Our network runs through Pi Hole, so blocking stuff is relatively easy, but when I've bothered to check the logs it doesn't look like the Freesat box does anything untoward.

There are limitations when streaming through the Freesat box, but as we mostly watch iPlayer and ITVX we don't experience those. We subscribe to ITVX purely to get rid of the advert breaks, which seems to work OK. You still get the breaks where the ads would have been but they only last a second or two.

The other way to stream fairly privately is to use something like OSMC. For a time we ran this on a Raspberry Pi 3 and it was fine. My only slight criticism was that the menus were a bit clunky, but other than that it worked OK and was pretty secure.
I use a Rpi with Kodi, for the tv bit I use a Rpi tvtuner hat (£5-10 on Amazon) + tvheadend + kodi addon. Works great, hdmi cec & all.
 
Smart TVs are a privacy nighmare and their main purpose has become to turn you into the product by means of ads, telemetry and data mining (which they then sell on).
I have a Roku device that constantly tried to call home - luckily I'm running network wide Ad Guard that bocks it
 
When I was looking around at running a smart TV as a dumb one I found lots of tales of TVs that constantly bleated at you to connect them, even some that pretty much refuse to work unless they can call home.

This isn't that surprising, as looking at the publicly available financial data for one or two smart TV makers it's clear that they make about twice as much from data sales and advertising as they do from TV sales. My guess is that they can cut the price of the TVs to the bone because they make more money from advertising and data.

Does mean they aren't going to want people to buy the things and then disable their main revenue stream!
 
I can see the value in being able to receive TV news broadcasts without your home needing to have a working broadband connection or being covered by a mobile network that isn't out of capacity due to widespread weather events causing problems. Moving to an all-IP future is something that needs to come along with resilient paths and for home users that just isn't going to happen. A brief power outage here yesterday during the thunderstorm downed the mobile network almost instantly as everybody picked their phone up and presumably tried to tether it - I got a Teams message through to say my power was out but after that EE and Vodafone both showed excellent signal strength but no data was getting through at all.

Moving to DVB-T2 and ditching SD channels would be a sensible move if there is a need to make better use of capacity.
 
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